Who are refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers? Refugees are defined and protected by international law. Asylum-seekers are seeking asylum in another country to seek the status of refugees. Migrants usually are moving across national boundaries for economic reasons, primarily to seek employment. The technical status is secondary to the huge human need due to wars, the climate crisis, and civil unrest in failed states.

We need to create a more just and equitable immigration system. We currently try to process all three through the same system, and it doesn’t work. Migrant workers usually are processed via a work permit program, but so are educated and high-demand workers. Even if they fill urgent labor shortages, such as health care, and have a work permit, it takes years to get a green card to start the process to becoming a naturalized citizen.

Those who have currently overflowed the system are claiming asylum. Whether they are retained in a secondary country for processing or processed in this country, the flood has exceeded our capacity to process the hundreds of thousands of people crossing our southern border. The system is broken, but it can only be fixed by federal legislation. Building walls isn’t a solution because walls don’t work. They just make the process more dangerous.

The border states suffer the most from the lack of support services, housing, lack of border patrol personnel, and administrative clerks and judges. People shouldn’t have to go to court just to enter the country. The federal government has dodged the issue and pushed it down onto the states, who simply don’t have the resources to cope. In the past, the government has relied on non-profit and charitable organizations to resettle immigrants, but it is grossly inadequate. Of course, we don’t want to allow criminals or terrorists to enter so we need a system of background checks and references. With AI and databases capable of processing millions of people daily, it is not beyond our capabilities.

We need immigrants to fill job vacancies. We need to welcome those who are fleeing desperate circumstances, but we also need to work more closely with the countries from which they are fleeing. That may include diplomatic pressure, loans, or outright grants for economic development through US-AID. In the past that has been focused on European and African nations rather than our hemisphere. We need a Marshall Plan for Central and South America rather than just writing off the region as hopelessly dominated by dictators.

Control of our borders is a question of national security and thus primarily a responsibility of the federal government and the Congress. We processed millions of people during the 19th Century for many years before computers, so why can’t we do it now?

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